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M+, Hong Kong. (Photo:Virgile Simon Bertrand. © Virgile Simon Bertrand. Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron)
M+, the long-awaited museum of visual culture at the heart of Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District, has announced an opening date and the titles of its inaugural exhibitions.
The museum will open to the public on Friday, November 12, 2021. It will open with six exhibitions:
- Hong Kong: Here and Beyond, which documents Hong Kong's transformation and the city's visual culture from the 1960s to the present.
- M+ Sigg Collection: From Revolution to Globalisation, which will showcase a selection of works drawn from the M+ Sigg Collection—a collection of art donated to the museum in 2012 by philanthropist and former diplomat Uli Sigg, who amassed the largest collection of contemporary Chinese art in the world before giving much of it to M+. The show is a chronological survey of the development of contemporary Chinese art from the 1970s through the 2000s.
- Things, Spaces, Interactions, a thematic and chronological exploration of international design and architecture over the last seventy years.
- Individuals, Networks, Expressions, a show featuring post-Second World War art from around the world, but curated from an Asian perspective.
- Antony Gormley: Asian Field, which features an expansive installation created by celebrated British sculptor Antony Gormley. The work is made up of tens of thousands of clay figurines created by Gormley in 2003 in collaboration with more than 300 villagers from a village in Guangdong. It is a reflection on the province's vast territory and population.
- The Dream of the Museum, an exhibition of conceptual art that relates to Asia.
The museum has not yet revealed exactly which works will be featured in each exhibition.
See also: Art Collectors William And Lavina Lim On Donating Nearly 100 Artworks To M+
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The Grand Staircase inside M+. Photo: Kevin Mak. © Kevin Mak. Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron)
M+ is dedicated to collecting and exhibiting visual art, moving images, design and architecture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and aims to rival international museums such as Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In total, M+'s collections include more than 55,000 objects relating to the history and culture of Hong Kong and of Asia more broadly.
The M+ building has been designed by Swiss studio Herzog de Meuron and houses 17,000 square metres of exhibition space across 33 different galleries, three cinemas, a learning hub and a roof garden that faces Victoria Harbour. The building's façade is embedded with LED lights, which when activated turn the tower into a giant screen that can be used for showing moving image works from the museum's collection.
In a statement, Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director of M+, said: "I firmly believe that the future history of the art museum will be written to a significant degree in Asia. Few institutions will be more pivotal to that story than M+, a brand new centre for visual culture and a world-class landmark for a great international city. M+ delivers the stories from our part of the world, told by voices participating in and influencing the global conversation."
